Rothko comments

In 1959, on holiday in Italy, Mark Rothko went with his wife Mell and their eight-year-old daughter Kate for a day's visit to the Graeco-Roman city of Paestum on the Amalfi coast south of Naples. Paestum boasts three Doric temples generally agreed to be among the best preserved of their kind in the world. The Rothkos were travelling with another family, that of John Hurt Fischer, an editor at Harper's Magazine whom the painter had met on the sea journey from New York. Rothko had already visited Pompeii and had felt a "deep affinity" between his own painting and the murals in the House of Mysteries there, in which he recognised "the same feeling, the same broad expanses of sombre colour" - and anyone who has seen the House of Mysteries will certainly agree with this judgment, for the similarities with the work he was doing then are uncanny, given that Rothko had painted a number of murals that were eventually to be housed in Tate's Rothko Room, before he visited Pompeii. Now, at Paestum, he was similarly struck by the modelling of the temples, at once groundedly monumental and celestially lightsome, and wholly mysterious.

On the journey down from Naples the party had fallen in with a couple of Italian youths who offered to act as guides. At Paestum, where the odd-assorted little band picnicked at noon in the Temple of Hera, the young men expressed their curiosity as to the identity and occupations of the Americans. Fischer's daughter, who was acting as interpreter, turned to Rothko and said: "I have told them that you are an artist, and they ask whether you came here to paint the temples," to which Rothko replied: "Tell them that I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it."